Odyssey, xv, 415.
The recently discovered ruins in Mashonaland (Rhodesia) prove, perhaps, that their unrecorded expeditions reached to S. Africa; see works by Bent, Neal and Hall, Keane, etc.
[764] 326 B.C. In Arrian’s Indica, 18, et seq.
[765] Strabo, XVII, i, 13.
[766] Pliny, Hist. Nat., vi, 26; Pseud-Arrian, Peripl. Mar. Erythr., 57. For a discussion as to the date of Hippalus see Vincent, Commerce of the Ancients, ii, p. 47, etc. The S.W. monsoon blows from April to October, the N.E. in the interval.
[767] Very small, however, according to modern ideas; Pliny (op. cit., vi, 24) gives them 3,000 amphorae, not more than 40 or 50 tons register. Arrian (op. cit., 19) marks the distinction between “long, narrow war-galleys and round, capacious trading ships.” A few great ships—floating palaces rather—were built by the Ptolemies and Hiero of Syracuse, but they were never seriously employed in navigation; Athenaeus, v, 36, et seq. Yet ships of at least 250 tons register were in common use by 170; Pand., L, v, 3.
[768] Pliny, op. cit., vi, 26, et seq.; Pseud-Arrian, op. cit., 57. The vessels had to be armed lest they should fall in with pirates. “The merchant floating down the stream; the caravan crossing the desert, mounting the defile, looking out upon the sea and its harbours; the ferry passing the river; the mariners in their little ship—they are real figures, yet they are nameless, all but a few; they suffer and they succumb without ever finding a voice for their story. On the desert, perhaps, a cloud of robber horse burst upon them; on the river the boat sinks, overladen; in the mountain passes they drop with cold; in the dirty lanes of the mart they die of disease. Commerce is not organized, safeguarded, universalized, as at present, but, such as it is, it reaches wide, and its life is never quite extinct.” Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, i, p. 177.
[769] Pliny, op. cit., vi, 19. He remarks that Pompey, during the Mithridatic war, first made the existence of this trade known to the Romans; cf. Strabo, XI, ii, 16; the geographer notes that Dioscurias, about 50 miles north of Phasis, was a great barbarian mart frequented by 70, or even, as some said, by 300 different nations; see also Ammianus, xxiii, 6.
[770] Cosmas, op. cit., ii; cf. Procopius, De Bel. Pers., i, 20.
[771] So called from a sophist who was murdered there; Libanius, Epist., 20. Previously Nicephorium.